10.8.2 spotlight indexing issue

Thank you adrianruica and Phobos

This worked only temporarily - now the **** spotlight indexing came back and no files were changed or deleted.

Any other suggestions anyone?

It is com.apple.ls.boxd (with L not i).

Check again the file. I applied this "treatment" to 3 Macs and I have no more problems. Or it was temporary, you added or deleted many files and spotlight really had to work hard. Please, check with Activity Monitor, to see which process hogs your CPU. This method resolves only the mdworker.

Originally I was getting three sets of messages in console. Now I'm only getting two, and those come less often. So the fix is worth doing.

The first messgae set would be "mdworker[xxxx]: Unable to talk to lsboxd" (one for every userid + one for _spotlight)

This would then be followed by one "PM kernel[0]: Sandbox: sandboxd(yyy) deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd" message

and then followed by "PM sandboxd[yyy]: ([xxxx]) mdworker(xxxx) deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd" messages (one for every userid + one for _spotlight)

This didn't seem to be a CPU hog, and spotlight still seemed to be working correctly, but it flooded the system log with messages obscured other information, and the time covered by the log was less. On my MacBookAir, I'm worried about this wearing out the flash in SSD..

The fix to "System.sb" got rid of the "deny mach-lookup com.apple.ls.boxd" message and the "Unable to talk to lsboxd" messages occur less frequently now, about every 4 minutes. A short time (20s??) after sending the "Unable to talk to lsboxd" message, the mdworker process dies. Activity monitor doesn't note any faults or hangs associated with the dying mdworker processes after the console messages.

The "deny mach-lookup com.apple.coresymbolicationd" " message now occurs very infrequently, perhaps once per hour.

I used this fix on my macbook pro and it worked great. On my Mac Pro however I do not have a system.sb (or any other entry) in profiles?! This leaves me confused as to a next step

Is it possible that on your MacPro you are looking in /Library/Sandbox/Profiles instead of /System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles?

Its easy to mix those two up. If thats not the case I would activate "show hidden files" and check if perhaps those files are hidden.

That was exactly the problem; I guess I needed more coffee. Thanks!

For the record, modifying system.sb effectively killed my machine. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but after modifing my machine went from being slow to completely unusable. Sure, spotlight isn't indexing, but then again my machine isn't really doing much after logging in so it doesn't matter.

Not sure if I did anything wrong, but I wouldn't recommend this fix.

Turns out that spelling is VERY IMPORTANT ("boxed" is not the same as "boxd"). This fix works, I'm just a moron. Sorry for sounding the alarm before I did a thorough check.

10.8.2

iMac 2010

8 GB RAM

I came acrross this problem, when I noticed, that when building a jar or a zip file, it took a long time to complete. The cause seems to be this mdworker process starting and boosting up towards 100% cpu usage.

So I applied the fix suggested by adrianruica

After restarting the system, I am now back to seconds instead of minutes building my jar and zip files.

thanks for finding this temporary solution.

Thanks for letting is know!!!

Hi guys. Having same issues too. After reading this came up with an idea to exclude the whole Home folder from search results by adding it to Privacy tab in Spotlight Pref Pane. Log out - Log in, removed it from Privacy tab in Preferences. Log out - Log in, open Spotlight, tyle any letter, OS starts indexing. 55mins remaining in my case. Afterwards, everything worked normal, quick serach without indexing prompt and high processing.
Hope this works for you.
Cheers.

MBP 5,1 10.8.2.

Had the same issue and this is what worked for me (10.8.3) :

1) Deleted the content of /var/folders/

2) Put in the privacy list of Spotlight :

- my TM drive

- Dropbox folder

- Google Drive

- /var/folders

So far so good, no more issue since a week.

None of the fixes work for me, on 10.8.3. First, don't change the "i" to "l" or the Finder won't load. The guy who sent that in and then wrote in the correction didn't specify which "l" he's talking about. Also, I assume "boxd" is correct. Either way, didn't work. Home folder in and out didn't work. Since I don't know where var/folders is, I haven't tried that one. I also tried a couple of Terminal fixes with spotlight, nada.

Does anyone have a real, tried, tested fix that works on 10.8.3? And, of course, why can't Apple fix it, it would take them 10 minutes, while the rest of us

fool around blindly.

MBP Retina 13

10.8.3

Miffed

I occasionnally get this mdworker process to grab 100% of processor activity in short bursts jumping from one core to another (iMac 10.8.3 - 4 cores), which causes sluggish operation and brings heat problems in a matter of a few minutes.

I've read somewhere that restarting in safe mode (Shift key at reboot) and restarting again after a complete boot cures the problem (or, more precisely, the symptom).

I've had to do just that 4 times in the past 2-3 months, and it worked all the times.

Of course it doesn't cure the unknown cause of the problem, but it sure is a relief to be able to get back to work with no more overheating and no more of this sluggish operation.

I wish you tried this and report if it works.

I only hope we are dealing with the same problem here.

YM

Go to /System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles/ and there should be a file named "system.sb".

1 Make a backup of the original one and place somewhere safe on your harddisk.

2 Copy system.sb on the desktop to can edit.

3 Open it with a text editor and check for the block thext:

;;; Allow IPC to standard system agents.

(allow mach-lookup

(global-name "com.apple.bsd.dirhelper")

(global-name "com.apple.system.logger")

(global-name "com.apple.system.notification_center")

(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.libinfo")

(global-name "com.apple.system.DirectoryService.libinfo_v1")

(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.membership")

(global-name "com.apple.xpcd"))

4 Add these 2 lines (in bold), then the block thext will look like this:

;;; Allow IPC to standard system agents.

(allow mach-lookup

(global-name "com.apple.bsd.dirhelper")

(global-name "com.apple.system.logger")

(global-name "com.apple.system.notification_center")

(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.libinfo")

(global-name "com.apple.system.DirectoryService.libinfo_v1")

(global-name "com.apple.system.opendirectoryd.membership")

(local-name "com.apple.ls.boxd")

(global-name "com.apple.is.boxd")

(global-name "com.apple.xpcd"))

5 Save system.sb on the destop, then delete the original one in the /System/Library/Sandbox/Profile and replace with this modified one. Spotlight (mdworker) should calm down.

Thanks to Phobos.

This looks like it is working for us. THANK YOU!